Tag Archives: NSVS 14256825

2012 brought us yet another remarkable year of extrasolar planet science. While the planet catch for 2012 was a little less than last year’s, the quality and importance of planets revealed this year was amazing. By far the most major results have been the discovery of an ~Earth-mass planetary companion orbiting the secondary component of the nearest star system to our own, Alpha Centauri (see here), and evidence for a system of planets around the nearby star Tau Ceti (see here). I hesitate to draw conclusions from a small amount of data, but the discovery of a terrestrial planet at none other than our nearest neighbour seems to really emphasize the point that terrestrial planets are likely as common as dirt.

A nice system of planets was reported at Gliese 676A consisting of super-Earths and Jovian planets, HATnet and SuperWASP produced more hot Jupiters, and interestingly, a couple sub-Earths may have been found around the nearby star Gliese 436. Spitzer provided us with the first detection of thermal radiation from a super-Earth (see here). A pair of M giants also became the first known to have planets, with planets reported around HD 208527 and HD 220074.

Kepler results picked up en masse this year. At first it started out nice and slow, with small groups of planets being announced in batches (See here, here, here and here), followed by dozens and dozens of planets.

Interesting Kepler results included Kepler-64, the first quadruple-star system with a planet. The planet is a circumbinary planet, no less. But easily the most important circumbinary planet find was Kepler-47, the first transiting multi-planet circumbinary system. Multi-planet circumbinary systems have been found before but this is the first to have multiple planets transiting. This allows not only for their existence to be much more certain (non-transiting circumbinary planets still suffer from the mass-inclination degeneracy), but allows us to test for coplanarity. The Kepler-47 system demonstrates conclusively that short-period binary stars can host full systems of planets. Another pair of planets with very close orbits to each other, yet very dissimilar densities were reported at Kepler-36. The orbits of the planets in the Kepler-30 system were shown to be well-aligned with their host star’s equator, showing us that systems of planets are, like ours, often neatly arranged and not chaotically scattered.

Good news and bad news about the Kepler spacecraft. The good news is that the mission is extended for another three years. The bad news is that unfortunately, a reaction wheel on the Kepler spacecraft failed, and the mission’s continued usefulness now rests on all of the other reaction wheels remaining operational.

Kepler also unveiled a system of three sub-Earth planets huddled around a dim red dwarf, Kepler-42, which is very similar to Barnard’s Star, as well as a possible small terrestrial planet being evaporated away due to the heat from its star (see here). One of these three planets is Mars-sized(!).

Last but not least, habitable planet candidates were reported around Gliese 163 and HD 40307, with unconfirmed habitable planet candidates reported at Tau Ceti and Gliese 667 C – with two more planets possibly occupying the star’s habitable zone. If GJ 667 Ce is confirmed, then it would be the most promising habitable zone candidate to date, based on its low mass.

At the end of 2011, I gave some wild guesses as to how the extrasolar planet landscape would look like at the end of 2012. Here we are and how have those predictions held up?

The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia lists 854 planets as of the time of this writing, however it is missing quite a few. My own count has us at 899 planets.

The discovery of a ring system around a transiting planet

There are hints of ring systems (or perhaps rather circumplanetary disk systems) around Fomalhaut b, β Pictoris b, and 1SWASP J140747.93-394542.6 b (see here) but none of these are confirmed. So I’m calling it a missed prediction.

More low-mass planets in the habitable zone from both radial velocity and transit

Two new habitable planet candidates from radial velocity, none from transit.

I was counting on continued monitoring of the HR 8799 planets to search for atmospheric variability, but it simply didn’t happen (or rather, if it did happen, the results are still pending). So I’m calling this a miss.

2013 could be a very interesting year, especially for Kepler. It seems we are on the verge of finding a true Earth analogue. The detection rate of candidate habitable planets is picking up and we’re really starting to get a list of targets to follow-up in the next decade. Here’s some more brave guesses for the end of 2013: